The discussion below is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.
The use of communication devices for (electronic) services has become very popular in the last two decades. Mobile telephony and electronic banking are examples of electronic services that heavily penetrated the daily life of people. Other examples include electronic mail and use of the internet, such as visiting web pages with information, participating in electronic friends networks and contributing to web discussions. Other services relate to regular mail delivery and electronic route navigation.
The ever increasing possibilities of electronic services go along with a significant amount of information people need to possess to make use of these electronic services. As a typical example, one needs to know a telephone number for contacting another person by telephone, an e-mail address to send an e-mail to this same person, a uniform resource locator (URL) to visit the website of this person, a bank account number to wire money to the bank account of this person etc. Moreover, in order to have a package or letter delivered by regular mail, one needs to know the delivery address. Furthermore, in order to make use of a route navigation service, one needs to know details about the destination location.
Thus, the variety of available services requires users of these services to possess specific service contact details of an intended recipient of these services.
In the prior art, attempts have been made to bring a variety of these services under a single service contact identifier, such as a telephone number.
As an example, it is known in the art to use a single telephone number of a recipient for obtaining telephony services, internet services and payment services as exemplified by the ENUM initiative (www.enum.nl). The telephone number is processed and a service is requested after the processing.
However, the user of the services is still required to possess the telephone number of the recipient. This requirement may also be disadvantageous for using other services than telephony, because the telephone number is also required for the payment service and the internet service. In other words, even if the user would possess the bank account number of the recipient, he would not be capable to wire money to the recipient in the absence of a telephone number of the recipient of the payment.
There is a need in the art to provide an improved method and system for allowing users to make use of a service.